hackaday.com Archives - 26 February 2013, Tuesday

The creator of this project started off with a 7″ tablet he received from a coworker. The screen was horribly smashed from one corner spreading out through the entire surface. But the hardware inside still worked, including the HDMI out port. He ended up transplanting the tablet hardw...

[Navin] has been hard at work producing a GUI which works with different micocontrollers . The idea is to make it even easier to develop projects by simplifying the feedback and control you can get from the prototyping hardware. The best part about it is that he designed the software ...

Apartment dwellers who are living the nomadic lifestyle take note. You don’t need to live your tinkering lifestyle out of a toolbox. Here is a great example of a respectable electronics bench which breaks down when it’s time to move (translated ). We’re sure you already belong to your...

The 1980s were a heyday for strange computer architectures; instead of the von Newmann architecture you’d find in one of today’s desktop computers or the Harvard architecture of a microcontroller, a lot of companies experimented with strange parallel designs. While not used much today...

One thing that’s really convenient for custom Eagle parts is that most components are DIPs or some sort of leaded SMD component. [Dave]‘s script takes the dimensional data from any chip’s datasheet and creates a custom outline for each part. The inputs and outputs can also be ripped d...

Beware that smoothing 3D printed parts with a solvent is PATENTED, just like many other OBVIOUS little things you can do while making 3D printed parts also have been granted ridiculous patents. Some obvious examples are: 1) Keeping your 3D printer at a warm temperature in a temperatur...

[Douglas Adams] will tell you not to forget your towel when it comes to space travel. But NASA may start mandating that astronauts always carry a toothbrush. That’s because when a recent repair on a critical International Space Station component went wrong it was a toothbrush hack tha...

Many of the parts come from a washing machine that the team scrapped for the build — most notably the motor which drives the belt. But pretty much every part of it is salvaged. For instance, the conveyor belt that transports the full glasses was made from gluing sections of bicycle in...

At first we thought that [Pete Prodoehl] was using the wrong term when calling his project a Laser Kaleidoscope . We usually think of a kaleidoscope as a long tube with three mirrors and some beads or glass shards in one end. But we looked it up and there’s a second definition that me...

[Art Barrios] kept having night-time visitors who were raiding his dog’s food storage bin. It’s a plastic tub with a lid that latches but the critters were knocking it over and popping that lid off. He wanted to find out which animal was the culprit so he hacked together an automatic ...

We love the concept of using an LCD screen to transfer data. The most wide-spread and successful method we know of is the combination of a QR code and the camera on a smart phone. But for less powerful/costly devices data can be transferred simply by flashing colors on the screen. Tha...

The Raspberry Pi is great if you’re looking for a cheap yet powerful computer running Linux, but let’s not forget all the other ARM dev boards out there. [Adam] spent some time this weekend putting together an Ubuntu distro for his Beagleboard XM to give it the convenience of a GUI an...

The migraine-inducing image above is the product of [Rupert Hirst]‘s attempts at home PCB fabrication. He’s using the toner transfer method – printing a circuit on a piece of transparency sheet with a laser printer, setting it on a piece of copper clad board, and sending the whole ass...

Building RGB LED displays is one of the most interesting programming and engineering challenges we see here on Hackaday. Not only do the creators of large displays and LED cubes have to deal with the power requirements of driving a whole bunch of LEDs, but there’s also the issue of ge...

A while back, [m0xpd] picked up an unbearably cheap AD9850 DDS module from ebay. He turned this in to a Raspberry Pi-powered radio beacon, but like so many builds that grace our pages, the trolls didn’t like using such an overpowered computer for such a simple device. To keep those tr...

Autonomous: “not subject to control from outside; independent.” Remote Control: “control of a system or activity by a person at a different place” Please don’t write “remote-controlled, autonomous” as a description for anything. They pretty much mean opposite things! This is one of my...

Scratch, a graphical programming language developed by MIT’s Media Lab, is an excellent tool for teaching programming. [Daniel] created an Arduino Sensor Shield to interface with Scratch, allowing for real-world input to the language. This board is a derivative of the Picoboard , whic...

Those of us have been dual booting Linux, Windows, and OS X operating systems for a while will be familiar with bootloaders such as GRUB and its ilk. Surprisingly, though, we haven’t seen a bootloader for the most popular computer of the last year – the Raspberry Pi. It makes sense to...

Controlling the pH level of a solution is usually a tedious task. Adding an acid or base to the solution will change the pH, but manually monitoring the levels and adding the correct amount isn’t fun. [Reza] rigged up an automated pH controller to keep a solution’s pH steady. The buil...

[Matt Galisa] decided to try his hand at setting up the Belkin WeMo outlet without using a Smartphone app . The hardware is a pass-through for mains voltage which allows you to switch the plug over the network. It has a built-in WiFi module which normally connects to your home network...

We at [HAD] love any hack that combines children’s toys with science-fiction technology, so seeing a Tickle-Me-Elmo “frozen” in [Carbonite] is a definite win in our book. It’s also a great argument for joining your local Hackerspace, or just getting together with some like-minded frie...

It may just be another 3D printer, but [Jonas] and [Simon]‘s Kühling & Kühling RepRap Industrial is a cross between a work of art and a beautiful machine tool. It also looks to be a pretty nice 3D printer, to boot. The Kühling RepRap is built out of 20mm t-slot aluminum with plastic s...

this Python script used for WeMo hacking . It was originally meant to issue commands to the outlet once it had passed the initial setup. [Matt] followed along but couldn’t get an answer on the port he expected. It turns out that the device listens on a different port until the initial...

Last summer, we here at Hackaday participated in the Red Bull Creation Contest. Basically, twelve teams were given webcams and instructions to build something cool. The teams live streamed their build process, and the best of the bunch won a trip to the New York Maker Faire. [Jason Na...

This entire project could have been done as an app, drawing the maze and ball virtually on the screen. But that wouldn’t have been nearly as fun as what [Matt] accomplished. He built a little Labyrinth which responds to the accelerometer in his phone . Take a close look at that handse...

[Leland Flynn] did a great job of picking apart the firmware image for a Westell 9100EM FiOS router . Unfortunately he didn’t actually find the information he was looking for. But he’s not quite done poking around yet either. If you have never tried to make sense of an embedded Linux ...

a home lighting hack that doesn’t require you to think about it after the initial setup. Instead of requiring the user to launch an app and select a lighting state, it uses NFC tags to select a lighting configuration. The tags can be placed in different parts of the house so that sett...

If you’ve got a BeagleBone and an FPGA board you should give this Bitcoin mining rig a try . The hardware uses brute-force to solve hashes, looking for the rare sets that can be used as digital currency. This particular example is designed for the LOGi-bone which is an FPGA shield for...

Possibly the most important part of the build is figuring out how to hinge all the weight a bookcase will carry. His solution was to use a set of four heavy-duty casters. He cut off the wheels from one pair and the mounting brackets from another. By welding the brackets on in place of...

A lot of the board houses out there including Seeed and ITead studios have a fixed size for circuit boards before the price goes up. A one-inch square board costs the same as a much larger 5cm x 5cm board, making panelized PCBs a great way to get more boards for the same amount of mon...